Microsoft: We’re in an ‘AI Spring’

Microsoft’s secret weapons to get back to the top of the tech mountain: machine learning and artificial intelligence, some of the company’s top R&D brains said Monday.

Harry Shum, head of technology and research at Microsoft, said the big trends that his team is working on involves how a person interacts with a computer. “We are now moving from the personal computer to personal computing,” he said at Microsoft’s Think Next 2014 conference in Tel Aviv.

Microsoft is investing heavily in “invisible user interface” technology, said Yoram Yaacovi, who heads up Microsoft’s research and development center in Israel. Yaacovi said people in the future won’t need to touch, type or speak to their devices — the devices will “know” what we want them to do before we ask. He called it “UI.Next.”

“User interface started with the command prompt, moved to graphics, then touch, and then gestures,” Yaacovi said. “It’s now moving to invisible UI, where there is nothing to operate. The tech around you understands you and what you want to do” — and that’s what people expect, he said. “We’re putting this at the forefront of our efforts.”

Cortana, the virtual personal assistant Microsoft announced last week, is part of the company’s push into machine learning, Yaacovi and Shum said. Microsoft has positioned Cortana as a challenger to Apple’s Siri and Google Now.

Microsoft is pretty high on Cortana. Jeannette Wing, a vice president for research and one of Microsoft’s experts in “computational thinking” (read: machine learning) , said interacting with Cortana is more like a conversation than a response to a question.

“I speak to Cortana, Cortana responds. I speak back to it, and it understands that we’re still in the same conversation. It knows from the first sentence I said what I’m referring to,” she said at the conference. “That seems like such a small thing for human beings, but it’s huge.”

Most major technology companies in the world are looking into machine learning, she said, and Microsoft is making major strides. “We were in an AI winter, and now we’re in an AI spring,” Wing said.